Exactly four years after The Pennoyer Centre, Pulham St Mary was featured on the BBC’s Restoration Roadshow, the newly restored centre is to throw its doors open to the public.
Everyone is invited to come and view the building on Sunday 15th August from 11am until 5pm to see how the centre has been transformed from a derelict Victorian school building with unloved adjoining Guild Chapel into a modern community, heritage and business centre that retains, enhances and celebrates it fascinating history and architecture.
– The Pennoyer Centre will be open for inspection – see the Guild Chapel restored to a single space, the reopened West door and the newly discovered medieval piscina
– Heritage tours of the building explaining its features and the restoration process
– See a film of the restoration and slides from the last roadshow
– Demonstrations from some of the artisans who worked on the restoration of the Guild Chapel
– Informative displays, music, village fete activities, stalls and a treasure trail to the Church
– as well as a bar, BBQ and refreshments served from the new community café.
Sheila King, Chair of the Village Centre Team that has brought the project to fruition, said, “When the restoration project started back in 2005, we knew we had a lot of hard work ahead of us and sometimes wondered if we would ever get there so it is extremely exciting to be throwing the doors open to the public and I hope that the community will be delighted with what they see.”
Standing prominently in the centre of Pulham St Mary in South Norfolk, Pennoyer’s played a pivotal role in village life for more than six hundred years. In 1670 a free school was founded in the chapel by William Pennoyer. It was extended in around 1870 but eventually closed in 1988.
Its fascinating history draws together not only three hundred years of school and village life, but also the Guilds of medieval England, Puritan merchant William Pennoyer, Christ’s Hospital School, Harvard University in the USA and much more besides.
After closure in 1988 the school remained unused, and fell into dereliction. In 2006, a project team of local volunteers began seeking funding for an ambitious project to restore and extend the building as a meeting place for the local and wider community, for educational, social, recreational and business purposes.
Thanks mainly to a £934,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the £1.5m project to convert the school into a village centre is now complete.
Visitors will be able to discover and enjoy the fascinating history of the building and its benefactor William Pennoyer, as well as that of Pulham Air Station and the famous ‘Pulham Pigs’ airships which flew from there as well as join in village activities and enrol for education courses and workshops.
